Spiritual Beliefs

Quotes

King develops an intermediate set of principles to bridge the gap between meta-ethics and ethics, derived by deductive reasoning from the Help Principle.

.

Ethical principles

King develops an intermediate set of principles to bridge the gap between meta-ethics and ethics, derived by deductive reasoning from the Help Principle. King goes to considerable lengths to show that these secondary rules and principles follow automatically from empathy, obligation and the Help Principle, to establish them as axioms of ethics rather than opinions. They include:

* The autonomy principle – Let people choose their own help, unless you know their interests better than they do (which chimes with liberalism).

* The reciprocity rule - Apply the Help Principle to others as much as they would apply it themselves (which links to modern game theory and is developed by contrasting Islamic and Christian notions of reciprocity and forgiveness).

* The humility rule - Help others with humility and express gratitude for help you receive (which draws on Jewish philosopher Maimonides).

* The direct help rule - Treat people according to their own wants and intentions, not by what others want of them (which is distinctly Kantian).

From these, he offers clear moral guidelines, some of which run against established thinking. He covers a range of areas, including:

On lying

King dismisses the common rule ‘don’t lie’ as hypocritical because most people lie quite often. Arguing that lies can sometimes serve good purposes, he derives from his axioms of ethics:

*Communicate so people can do what’s best for the real circumstances;

*A justified lie requires a reason to believe the hearer would not act appropriately if told the truth;

*You should deceive only if you can change behaviour in a way worth more than the trust you would lose, were the deception found out; and

*Lies should only be told on special occasions; and

*Deliberately allowing someone to believe a falsehood amounts to a spoken lie.

King uses a similar approach to deduce rules on making and breaking promises.

On romance

King tries to establish clear rules for sexual conduct and romance. The strict requirement that these rules can apply independent of cultural settings means that the resulting norms are somewhat bland, although they do generally imply a liberal line.

On decision-making in groups

King seeks a third way between majoritarian and individualistic approaches to decision-making in groups. He derives two rules from his axioms:

* In small groups, choose whichever option benefits any individual the most.

* In large groups, choose whichever option has the best all-time outcome, by adding up the benefits and losses to people of each option.

He then tries to show how the two are compatible, and that the division between small and large depends on how much an individual can reciprocate help.

His conclusions have important implications when rights clash with democratic demands. King’s work suggests rights are not inalienable, and that they can occasionally be overruled when there is an overwhelming public interest. However, unlike Jeremy Bentham who famously dismissed rights as nonsense upon stilts, King provides a further justification for rights as a safeguard when facts are uncertain, through his theory of conventions.

On punishment

King tries to reconcile utilitarian notions of punishment with more intuitively appealing approaches, such as restorative and retributive justice. He does this through the concept of all-time value, which he derives from his contention that the morality of actions is independent of the time they take place. This enables hypothetical consequences in the past (e.g., the deterrence effect a punishment may have had) to be treated as equivalent to the impact in the future (i.e., the effect of the punishment). Thus, he concludes punishments for crimes should be based upon what would have been necessary to deter them, justifying a ''punishment should fit the crime'' approach, although he nuances this conclusion with caveats.

On poverty reduction

Reducing lethal poverty is a major theme in ''How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time'', where King derives a proof for substantial increases in the amount of money given to alleviate lethal poverty abroad, echoing Peter Singer and the Make Poverty History campaign. He calculates a typical worker in the UK should devote 0.75% of their income to a development charities for this.

On social justice

King argues that his Help Principle leads to three clear principles of social justice. One of these should appeal to Marxists who favour distributing wealth according to need, one to Thatcherites, Reaganites and other right wing thinkers who favour distribution according to effort, and one to pragmatists who emphasise practical issues. By trying to accommodate all three positions, King attempts to reconcile the radical political left, the radical right, and conservative centrism:

On religion

King is a humanist who argues that mapping out ethics rationally can dispel mystery from the subject and leave religion with no role in prescribing right and wrong. Just as Evolutionary Theory squeezed mystery out of creation taking religion with it, religion can now be displaced from ethics, too. He backs up this claim with arguments to show the redundancy of religion in moral matters, suggesting, for example, that if ‘God is Love’, then by Occam’s Razor, we should just concentrate on love. Citing the barbarism of the Aztec faith, he argues that some religions advocate bad actions, others good, so something other than religion is needed to adjudicate between them. He dismisses the widespread feeling of benevolence as a basis for religion, arguing that paranoia, infatuation and depression are equally common and again, something other than religion is needed to elevate benevolence above the others. Finally, he presents the possibility of an ‘anti-God’, and suggests there is no reason to obey any God over its equal and opposite anti-God which is both valid and non-circular.

Despite these attacks, King regards religion as a repository of accumulated wisdom and draws on aspects of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism to bolster his arguments.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Iain King, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki